What does a product development, engineering and manufacturing partner actually do?

We describe ourselves as a product development, engineering and manufacturing partner. Here’s what that means in practice.

It’s a mouthful, so let’s break it down. When we say we’re a product development, engineering and manufacturing partner, we mean that we help businesses take a physical product from commercial opportunity through development and engineering and into manufacturing.

In practice, that covers a lot of ground:

• Commercial and product strategy: making sure the product makes sense for its market before significant money is spent.
• Product design and development: turning the opportunity into a real, designed product.
• Engineering: resolving the technical detail so the product works and can be built.
• Prototyping: testing and refining at each stage.
• DFM / DFA: shaping the design so it can be manufactured and assembled efficiently.
• Supplier selection and factory auditing: finding the right manufacturers and checking they are up to the job.
• Quality control: making sure what’s produced matches what was specified.
• Supply-chain management, assembly and logistics: keeping components, production and delivery running smoothly.

You might not need all of it. Some clients come to us with a product idea and need the full journey. Others have a design and need engineering and manufacturing. Others have a product in production and need help with supplier issues or quality.

The important point is what this replaces. Without a partner like this, a business has to build the capability itself: hire engineers, find and vet factories, develop supply-chain knowledge, learn what a good production process looks like. That takes years and a lot of money, and it’s often not what the business is set up to do.

A partner gives you access to that capability without the overhead of building it. You get experienced people who have done this many times before, along with established relationships with manufacturers in the UK and Asia.

We’re also not the right fit for everyone, and we’ll say so if that’s the case. But if you have a physical product and want a capable team alongside you from opportunity to production, that’s what we’re here for.

Have a product opportunity you’d like to discuss? Start a conversation with us.